Anthropic and OpenEvidence bring free clinical AI to doctors in about 100 poor and middle-income countries

Anthropic and OpenEvidence bring free clinical AI to doctors in about 100 poor and middle-income countries

AI startup Anthropic and medical knowledge platform OpenEvidence announced on Tuesday, September 22 a partnership to roll out a free, region-adapted version of OpenEvidence to healthcare providers in around 100 countries – including Uganda, Angola, Sudan, Haiti and Mongolia. The rollout builds on a platform already in heavy use in the US, now to be adapted for health systems with very different conditions.

Anthropic and OpenEvidence confirmed the partnership on Tuesday, September 22, according to Reuters. The aim is to bring AI-powered clinical decision support to doctors in regions that currently lack access to such technology.

What is being rolled out, and where

OpenEvidence answers doctors' clinical questions by drawing on peer-reviewed medical research and treatment guidelines. The platform is already free for clinicians in the US and Europe. Now a specialized, free version is being rolled out aimed at healthcare providers in low- and middle-income countries.

The country list comes from OpenEvidence itself and has not been independently verified, but it includes Uganda, Angola, Sudan, Haiti and Mongolia, among others. In total, it involves around 100 countries.

Who does what

The division of labor is described by the companies themselves: Anthropic supplies the back-end technology – the AI capacity that powers the system – while OpenEvidence adapts the system to different regions, taking each country's healthcare infrastructure as the starting point.

"The technology itself has advanced so dramatically that the structure needed to get OpenEvidence to low-resource regions exists, but market mechanisms alone would not have accomplished it without this kind of entrepreneurship-driven, philanthropically oriented work," says Daniela Amodei, president of Anthropic, to Reuters.

OpenEvidence founder Daniel Nadler frames the initiative this way: "Access to medical knowledge should not depend on geography." He adds that "one hundred percent of what we're building for these places is context adaptive" – a company characterization, not a documented result.

The groundwork: Rwanda and Botswana

This is not OpenEvidence's first step beyond wealthy countries. In January, the company entered a partnership with the Rwanda Biomedical Center and the nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives to evaluate the decision-support tool in low-resource settings. Forty-five Rwandan doctors and nurses tested the system and gave feedback on how it could better reflect local clinical conditions, Resolve to Save Lives said at the time, according to Reuters and HealthDay's coverage.

The company has also worked with health organizations in Botswana, where differences in available treatments, diagnostic equipment and other resources can affect how medical information is used in practice. Earlier this year, OpenEvidence said it was working to adapt its tools for settings where disease patterns, diagnostic resources and available treatments differ markedly from those in wealthy countries.

How much is the platform already used?

The foundation for the expansion is OpenEvidence's growth in the US. Nadler says American clinicians used the platform 42 million times in August alone, and predicts that several hundred million Americans will by 2026 have been treated by a doctor who used OpenEvidence to guide treatment.

Both figures are the company's own claims and are not independently verified. They should be read as the company's own assessment of its reach, not as documented facts – but they explain why the company is now expanding internationally.

The access argument

Nadler points to a practical entry point: even where medical facilities lack reliable electricity, most doctors have smartphones, which gives them another route to clinical information.

The interest from clinicians in low- and middle-income countries is largely about literature access. Dr. Ahmed Bendary, a cardiologist at Benha University in Egypt, says that extending such access beyond the US and Europe "would be a tremendous leap forward, particularly in regions where institutional subscriptions to major medical journals are limited, making evidence-based, point-of-care tools even more vital."

The point is concrete: where a hospital or university cannot afford subscriptions to the major medical journals, a free tool that aggregates and summarizes research and guidelines can fill a real gap in everyday clinical practice.

Sudan shows where the need is greatest

Sudan is one of the countries on the rollout list, and illustrates how fragile the health infrastructure can be where the tool is now being introduced. As of April, 37 percent of health facilities in Sudan's 18 states were non-functional, according to the World Health Organization, while disease outbreaks and malnutrition have further strained the remaining system. The WHO says 21 million people lack access to health services, and that it has verified 217 attacks on health care since the conflict began in April 2023.

What remains open

Several important questions are unanswered in the source material:

• The economics. Anthropic and OpenEvidence have not disclosed the financial terms of the partnership. It is thus unclear whether this is a commercial arrangement, a charitable one or something else – and who pays for operations and adaptation over time.
• Effect and uptake. There is no independent documentation of the tool's accuracy or actual use in the roughly 100 countries. Nadler's description of the system as "context adaptive" is a company statement, not a documented result.
• Selection criteria. How the roughly 100 countries were chosen is not documented, and the full list has not been made public.
• The source picture. The story's documentation rests on Reuters reporting built on the companies' own statements.

Why it matters

Regardless of the open questions, the rollout points to a concrete shift in how AI tools spread globally: a clinical decision-support tool already in extensive use in the US is being made available – free – to doctors in countries where access to up-to-date medical knowledge has long been limited by economics rather than technology. The partnership also illustrates a model in which an AI company supplies the underlying capability while a domain-specialized company takes responsibility for regional adaptation.

Whether this actually improves clinical practice in Uganda, Sudan, Haiti or Mongolia, however, will depend on something no one has yet measured: how a tool built on wealthy countries' medical literature performs when the reality in the clinic looks different.